Author Leslie Cannold says she will no longer stand as a WikiLeaks Senate candidate.

AAP: Darren James

The bid by WikiLeaks Party founder Julian Assange to win seats in the Senate has taken a blow, with a key candidate quitting because of a lack of transparency and accountability in the party.

Author and ethicist, Leslie Cannold, is second on the WikiLeaks Party's Senate ticket in Victoria and would have been installed if Julian Assange wins but cannot take up the seat.

Mr Assange, who is first on the ticket, is currently holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, fighting extradition to Sweden where he is wanted for questioning over allegations of sexual assault.

Dr Cannold, has announced this afternoon that she would be breaking faith with the Australian people if she remained as a candidate.

In a letter released to the media, she cites "vigorous debates" over Senate preference deals and says decisions made by the party's governing body have been "white-anted and resisted".

WikiLeaks triggered an angry response last weekend, particularly from the Greens, when it chose to give its first preferences to far-right wing candidates and parties in New South Wales, including the Australia First Party which is headed by a convicted criminal and former neo-Nazi.

In Western Australia, WikiLeaks has given its preferences to the Nationals ahead of one of WikiLeaks' biggest supporters, Greens Senator Scott Ludlum.

The party blamed the NSW decision on "administrative errors" but Dr Cannold disputes that.

"There were some indications that that was possibly not the case," she told PM.

"Because the National Council ... that actually is the democratic structure for the WikiLeaks Party, certainly had not directed preferences to go the way they did in WA and New South Wales.

"That was not supposed to happen and somehow on the ground it did anyway."

She told Triple J's Hack there was an attempt to subvert the party's processes.

"There was a concrete attempt to actually subvert the democratic processes in this party, to try to get people to break off into minor factions that would go around the National Council which is the structure and just do what the person who was proposing this said," she said.

WikiLeaks has problems with 'democratic processes': Dr Cannold

She says internal wrangling over the preference decisions "exposed problems with the capacity of the party to sustain its democratic processes".

"By staying in this role I am implicitly vouching for the worthiness of this party to receive the votes of the Australian people," she said in the statement.

"I can no longer do this because I no longer believe it is true, and so I must resign."

This evening she explained to PM's Mark Colvin that she "couldn't have taken this decision more seriously but in the end I just felt like I couldn't do anything else."